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As I work in Tribune Tower on North Michigan Avenue, I have plenty of chances to pass through Pioneer Court, the privately owned public space directly south of Tribune Tower and north of the Michigan Avenue Bridge over the Chicago River. Ever since the plaza, which is owned by the Zeller Realty Group, displayed the controversial 26-foot-high Seward Johnson statue known as Forever Marilyn, it seems to have morphed into a strikingly vibrant public stage. Scenes from "Divergent" were filmed there. So, earlier this fall, was a sequence for "Parks and Recreation." One morning I went out to watch former President Bill Clinton, who was prowling around there, looking at...

Related "Tribune Tower" Articles

As I work in Tribune Tower on North Michigan Avenue, I have plenty of chances to pass through Pioneer Court, the privately owned public space directly south of Tribune Tower and north of the Michigan Avenue Bridge over the Chicago River. Ever since the...

Ted Leonsis, the former senior AOL executive-turned-sports-team-owner/tech investor/dabbler in whatever interests him, sat down with his coffee Wednesday in the Argo Tea on the first floor of Tribune Tower and told me the building is haunted.
Oh no,...

Two weeks into training camp and nobody has gotten injured, including the mail carrier who brings your questions to the Tribune Tower. OK, so they’re actually emailed but this is an old-school mailbag.
Will the Bulls’ defense suffer with all the new...

Less than a week after the publication of Marja Mills' memoir, “The Mockingbird Next Door,” her story of befriending the famously reclusive 88-year-old author Harper Lee, the book remains embroiled in controversy.
On July 14, the day before the book's...

Netflix night with Harper Lee sounds like a late-night comedy sketch, as does an afternoon at the laundromat, or even a quick stop at McDonald's with the famously reclusive author of "To Kill a Mockingbird." Yet these scenarios represent just...

Urban planner Leslie S. Pollock wrote for Outside Opinion on July 27, criticizing the proposed location of the Lucas museum near Soldier Field. Here's an edited response:
The Lucas museum should be more visible? You don't know the design, and it...

For the first time in 90-plus years, the Chicago Tribune is disconnected from the broadcast business.
Its corporate family has been broken up and the Tribune, the wellspring of an empire built on ideas and innovation, is no longer complemented by the...

A genial disappointment about the preciousness of art amid the destructive horrors of war, "The Monuments Men" is scored to a military march by composer Alexandre Desplat. You hear what he was going for: jaunty heroics. The throwback sound of it...

On March 4, 1837, exactly 175 years ago, Chicago was incorporated. Not that Flashback needed a reason, but we took this occasion to compile a very long list of events, year by year and decade by decade, that helped shape this great city. Some events...

Half a century ago, the unthinkable became all too thinkable as the Soviet Union and the United States engaged in a game of chicken, played with nuclear bombs.
On Oct. 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy went on television to announce that the Soviet...

What do you do if your assignment is to cover the much-anticipated two-month filming of “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” in downtown Chicago – from where and what they filmed to what the cast has to say about filming here -- but access and answers prove...

About 75 protesters marched Thursday afternoon from President Barack Obama’s re-election headquarters to three consulates of countries that belong to NATO, protesting the alliance’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan and other military action. As...

An honor like the Nelson Algren Short Story Award can be a boon to a writer. It can give him or her the confidence to slog through rejections and trudge forward with literary endeavors. When we asked former Nelson Algren Award recipients what winning...

Covering the church beat takes on an entirely new dimension when that church is the Church of Scientology. Since its founding in 1954 by former pulp fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, the church has aggressively used the courts and public relations...

Frank Gehry was beating back some of the buzz about his new music pavilion in Millennium Park: It may look new wave, but it's really old hat, a pale echo of his acclaimed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
Gehry got the Chicago project in 1999, two...

You had to wonder when Donald Trump's Chicago skyscraper would descend into a circus. Last week, it showed signs of doing just that when city officials and Trump sources revealed that The Donald may stretch the spire atop his tower to potentially absurd...

Whew!
Flamboyant New York developer Donald Trump isn't going to foist one of his trademark exercises in architectural glitz on Chicago. He has even radically altered an earlier plan that would have erected a bloated blob of a high-rise alongside such...

This column was first published in Oct. 16, 2005
Philip Seymour Hoffman knows the voice well, the one any actor hears in his head sometimes after performing a scene onstage or on a movie set. It's the voice that murmurs: You're doing it...